This is a powerful poem about overcoming fear and not allowing it to master you, a declaration of self-belief and the importance of facing one’s fears. We’re all going to fear something at some point in our lives – perhaps many things. Maya Angelou, ‘ Life Doesn’t Frighten Me’. Jennings’ The Collected Poems are well worth getting hold of: she writes in traditional verse forms and rhyme schemes, but her poetry carries an emotional force which remains.ġ0. This poem from the wonderful poet Elizabeth Jennings, which is not available online, is about carrying ‘an old fear / A child could never speak about’. Usually we only include poems in these lists if those poems are available online somewhere (or, if not online already, are out of copyright and can be shared by us).
Auden writes as he hears the news of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, ‘uncertain and afraid’ for what the future will bring.Īlthough the poem begins in fear and uncertainty, it ends on a note of quiet hope as Auden realises what his role must be in the coming years. Written upon the outbreak of the Second World War, this poem by the great Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) is one of his greatest poems about that universal human emotion: fear. Written in around 1937 and published in 1940, it’s one of Empson’s last great poems. However, Empson plays around with the typical form of the villanelle here, using his two recurring refrains to describe the experience or ‘success’ of shaking off fear, which the poet likens to coming round from a drug. (We’ve selected some classic English villanelles here.) ‘I have mislaid the torment and the fear’, begins this villanelle from the twentieth-century poet who helped to make villanelles fashionable again. The cold black fear is clutching me to-nightĪs long ago when they would take the lightĪnd leave the little child who would have prayed,įrozen and sleepless at the thought of death …
In ‘Fear’, Teasdale captures the feeling of ‘cold black fear’ that grips us sometimes and won’t let go: Yet at its best, Teasdale’s work has a lyricism and beauty which can rival that of many poets of her time, even if her work is not as innovative or revolutionary as that of, say, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, or William Carlos Williams. Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American lyric poet whose work is often overlooked in discussions of twentieth-century American poetry.
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